Imagine the following case: A few years in the future, neuroscience has advanced considerably to the point where it is able to artificially support conscious activity that is just like the conscious activity in a human brain. After diagnosis of an untreatable illness, a patient, C, has transferred (uploaded) his consciousness to the artificial substrate… Read More »Would You Survive Brain Twinning?
This is the first in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Written By: J Adam Carter, COGITO, University of Glasgow
E-mail: adam.carter@glasgow.ac.uk
What are things going to be like in 100 years? Here’s one possible future, described in Michael P. Lynch’s The Internet of Us. He invites us to imagine:
smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain. With a single mental command, those who have this technology – let’s call it neuromedia – can access information on any subject ….
That sounds pretty good. Just think how quickly you could gain information you need, and how easy and intellectually streamlined the process would be. But here is the rest of the story:
Now imagine that an environmental disaster strikes our invented society after several generations have enjoyed the fruits of neuromedia. The electronic communication grid that allows neuromedia to function is destroyed. Suddenly no one can access the shared cloud of information by thought alone. . . . [F]or the inhabitants of this society, losing neuromedia is an immensely unsettling experience; it’s like a normally sighted person going blind. They have lost a way of accessing information on which they’ve come to rely.Read More »Cross Post: Brainpower: Use it or Lose it?
Written by Mette Leonard Høeg
Through the ordinary state of being, we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
Phenomenal consciousness is still a highly mysterious phenomenon – mainly subjectively accessible, and there is far from scientific consensus on the explanation of its sources. The neuroscientific understanding of the human mind is, however, deepening, and the possibilities of technologically and biomedically altering brain and mind states and for engineering awareness in technological systems are developing rapidly. Read More »Finding Meaning in the Age of Neurocentrism – and in a Transhuman Future
An interview with OUC academic visitor and former Oxford Uehiro Centre DPhil student Dr Emma Dore Horgan on her research into the ethics of neuro-interventions for offenders.
Professor Morten Kringelbach (Aarhus and Oxford) recently gave a fascinating New St Cross Ethics Seminar on ‘The Neuroscience of a Life Well-Lived’ (YouTube; mp3).Read More »The Neuroscience of a Life Well-lived: New St Cross Ethics Seminar
Audio and Video recordings of Professor Morten L. Kringlebach (Aarhus University, Denmark; University of Oxford) online St Cross Seminar (21 January 2021) are now available.
Read More »Seminar Recordings: The Neuroscience of a Life Well-Lived
Audio and video recordings of David Lyreskog’s online St Cross Seminar (25 February 2021) are now available.
Announcement: Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu’s new book ‘Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships‘, published by (Stanford University Press) is now available.
Is there a pill for love? What about an “anti-love drug”, to help us get over an ex? This book argues that certain psychoactive substances, including MDMA—the active ingredient in Ecstasy—may help ordinary couples work through relationship difficulties and strengthen their connection. Others may help sever an emotional connection during a breakup. These substances already exist, and they have transformative implications for how we think about love. This book builds a case for conducting research into “love drugs” and “anti-love drugs” and explores their ethical implications for individuals and society. Scandalously, Western medicine tends to ignore the interpersonal effects of drug-based interventions. Why are we still in the dark about the effects of these drugs on romantic partnerships? And how can we overhaul scientific research norms to take relationships more fully into account?
Should neurotechnologies that affect emotional regulation, empathy and moral judgment, be used to prevent offenders from reoffending? Is it morally acceptable to offer more lenient sentences to offenders in return for participation in neuroscientific treatment programs? Or would this amount too coercion? Is it possible to administer neurointerventions as a type of punishment? Is it… Read More »Video Interview: Jesper Ryberg on Neurointerventions, Crime and Punishment
Written by Stephen Rainey
Human beings are sometimes seen as uniquely capable of enacting life plans and controlling our environment. Take technology, for instance; with it we make the world around us yield to our desires in various ways. Communication technologies, and global transport, for example, have the effect of practically shrinking a vast world, making hitherto impossible coordination possible among a global population. This contributes to a view of human-as-maker, or ‘homo faber‘. But taking such a view can risk minimising human interests that ought not to be ignored.
Homo faber is a future-oriented, adaptable, rational animal, whose efforts are aligned with her interests when she creates technology that enables a stable counteraction of natural circumstance. Whereas animals are typically seen to have well adapted responses to their environment, honed through generations of adaptation, human beings appear to have instead a general and adaptable skill that can emancipate them from material, external circumstances. We are bad at running away from danger, for instance, but good at building barriers to obviate the need to run. The protections this general, adaptable skill offer are inherently future-facing: humans seem to seek not to react to, but to control the environment.
